Last week I urged you all to use reusable shopping bags instead of plastic bags. Let me explain. First, only 1 percent of plastic shopping bags are recycled, so many of them end up in my pond. Yuck! Many of you reuse those pesky plastic purses for other things, like bagging your garbage, and then they end up in a landfill where they never degrade because of lack of oxygen, water, light and other elements necessary for decomposition. Neither do those paper shopping bags. In fact, nothing does. But back to plastic bags, They really are better than paper bags in that they have less net environmental effect because they require less energy to produce, transport and recycle and they cost less to produce. But they are made of petrochemicals, a non-renewable resource. They are flimsy and when disposed of improperly, are a hazard to wildlife (that would be me), and they are not a pretty sight when sticking to a fence or tree branch or blowing in the wind (sounds like a song) like urban tumbleweeds. Sturdy reusable shopping bags are superior in every way to single use plastic bags; they need only be used two times to have a lower environmental impact than using 11 disposable plastic bags.
I know I am a smart frog, so let me tell you what is happening around the world. China will outlaw plastic bags on June 1, and Australia is planning a gradual phase-out by the end of the year. Germany and Ireland charge between 5 and 25 cents per single use plastic bag. Bangladesh has banned them because they are thought to cause flooding during monsoons by clogging drains and Bhutan has banned them on the grounds that they “make the country less happy.”
I agree with the Bhutanese, plastic bags make me less happy, especially when they are in my pond. Next week I’ll tell you what is happening here in the good old U.S.A., but in the meantime ... gotta go catch flies.
